Synopsis
Spread Me is a darkly seductive tale of survival from Sarah Gailey, bestselling author of Just Like Home. A routine probe at a research station turns deadly when the team discovers a strange specimen in search of a warm place to stay.
Kinsey has the perfect job as the team lead in a remote research outpost. She loves the isolation and the way the desert keeps temptations from the civilian world far out of reach.
When her crew discovers a mysterious specimen buried deep in the sand, Kinsey breaks quarantine and brings it inside. But the longer it’s there, the more her carefully controlled life begins to unravel. Temptation has found her after all, and it can’t be ignored any longer.
One by one, Kinsey’s team realizes the thing they’re studying is in search of a new host—and one of them is the perfect candidate….
Review
If you’re the kind of sex-positive horror reader who sees a title like Spread Me and automatically thinks of double-entendres, you’re Sarah Gailey’s target audience.
Spread Me is Gailey’s riff on The Thing, with a few important distinctions. Instead of being set in the Antarctic, Spread Me’s research station is desert-based, and the shape-shifting alien creature that can be anyone is, here, an Earth-based virus living a few feet below the shifting sands in the desert’s cryptobiotic soil. The researchers themselves are diverse, as are their sexual partnerships with one another. Gailey’s is a slow-burn modern-day update to the classic John Carpenter flick (and John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella, Who Goes There, which inspired it and Carpenter’s filmic predecessor, The Thing from Another World), with one other key difference – Spread Me is horny as fuck.
If there’s one genetic imperative driving all life on Earth, it is to reproduce. From the mitosis of single-celled organisms to us sex-having mammals, we all gotta do it like they do on the Discovery Channel. Gailey’s ancient (or perhaps newly evolved?) cryptobiotic virus seizes control of the humans it infects, causing rampant, unquenchable desire with occasional sides of body horror. It’s a nice touch that our lead heroine is named Kinsey, no doubt after famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Sadly, there are no Dr. Ruth’s at this desert research lab.
Although it’s set in a desert, there are certainly no dry spells happening inside this scientific habitat, even before these researchers are introduced to this sexed-up virus. While Gailey stops well short of Spread Me being a straight-up monster porn spoof, the eroticism is likely not of one’s usual expectations. In one instance, Kinsey masturbates imagining the penetration of cellular walls by a virus and keeps a poster of cellular organisms close at hand the way a teenager hides copies of Playboy. In another, while taking a biopsy, the act of puncturing skin with a needle is described the way one might write of sexual penetration. In order to gain her patient’s consent, Kinsey must assure assure the patient that this procedure really turns her on, transforming a rote medical exam into a pseudo-sexual ritual. Readers are forced to question consent and issues of control — and who, exactly, is manipulating whom — in this twisted dynamic.
Gailey knows that, despite the focus on the sexual predilections of her scientists and the virus they are forced to contend with, comparisons to The Thing are inevitable and she establishes early on that the movie is a favorite of these researchers, as it is for all good taste-having movie lovers. Even the characters are not immune to drawing parallels between their ordeal and the seminal, iconic 1982 film. “It’s impossible not to make John Carpenter references when you work at a research station in the middle of fucking nowhere,” one character intones at the start. Instead of a swear jar, they have a John Carpenter jar and every time somebody references the movie they have to pony up some cash. Another researcher wears a Baby Slut shirt in a deep cut reference to a Kurt Russell meme.
One might find it easy to view Spread Me in the context of covid. While it’s not directly a book about covid – Spread Me is set in a near-future where pandemics have become routine staples in daily life – it’s hard not to draw those parallels. The single-celled kinks at the heart of Gailey’s book recall the loud pro-COVID-19 forces that reared their ugly heads, demanding an end to masking protocols and for everyone to put themselves in danger for their own anti-masking comfort, delirious with a desire not only to be infected but to freely infect others even as they gussied it up under the guise of civil rights and freedom. These mask scofflaws were intent on doing the virus’s work for it, as if they were themselves some kind of Ur-virus wrapped up in the cellular walls of their flag and loud-mouthed ignorance. The mounting paranoia of who is infected parallels that of Carpenter’s The Thing, only instead of Cold War concerns, Spread Me has more recent worries that echo our period of isolation and sickness during the pandemic — who is infected, who is hiding it or lying about it, and who can be trusted when the masks, not to mention the clothes, come off?
Spread Me plays around a lot with sexual identity, too. Wanting to love, and to be loved, on one’s own terms as their own unique individual, warts or mutant limbs and all, are predominate themes. Kinsey and her staff of researchers defy heteronormativity, with Kinsey going a step further with her infatuation for single-celled organisms and their methods of replication. Isolated with only each other, the researchers pair off with fluid abandon for both same- and opposite-sex pairings and hints of threesomes behind closed doors, in their need for connection. Replication drives our genes, but it’s our need for understanding and camaraderie that unites us. All we need is love, be it platonic or romantic, but finding that love can be an ordeal, fraught with peril and complications, and maybe a little bit of murder here and there. As Johnny Cash once sang, love is a burning thing, but in Spread Me, nothing’s hotter than the desert…or what lies beneath.
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